Night of the Brand Shamans

* And the color palette is usually a witches’ brew of faddish, sterile and unemotional shades.

Brand guidelines don’t have to be bad. Sometimes they aren’t. But when your standards are created without donors in mind, that’s almost inevitably what you get.

Your brand is what you do and who you are -— as perceived by your public. What you look like is the smallest part of that. Most brand guidelines pay lip-service to this fact, but few of them do anything about it. Because they can’t. A brand is bigger than a set of rules. (Read about what a real brand is in “The Brand Mindset: Five Essential Strategies for Building Brand Advantage Throughout Your Company,” by Duane E. Knapp.)